My fiancé and I at the time, were engaged and getting ready to plan our wedding. My fiancé brought home an enormous Bride’s magazine and I was flipping through it to cut out pictures and find ideas and inspiration for our own modest wedding we were going to plan.
I happened to see an article to enter to win a “Dream Wedding” I looked at my fiancé and said to him, “We could win this, we are going to win this contest.” He looked at me like I was crazy, but he wanted to give me a dream wedding and what did we have to lose?
We agreed to start brainstorming and work on our entry, which required us to write an essay in 250 words or less about what we would do if we could win the wedding of our dreams and make it fantastical, magical etc. We had our brainstorming session but kept having to go back to the drawing table and finally decided our ideas were not creative enough to win the incredible dream wedding and all of the prizes included.
We both went to bed discouraged, but I couldn’t get that contest out of mind.

That night I woke up at 3:30 am and announced to my husband who was asleep, that I had it! It came to me in a dream. He rubbed his eyes and grabbed the paper and pencil he had placed on the nightstand and began to sketch out my idea. It went like this… We are going to create an entry that is a giant, larger than life wedding album that shows the pictures of the dream wedding we ALREADY won. Our perspective would be that we had already been picked as the winning couple and here was our wedding album and all of the amazing, crazy things we did on our fantasy wedding and honeymoon. We constructed it out of foam and handmade paper and my husband drew all of the pretend photos and we placed them in photo corner tabs just like in a real album. We wrote captions underneath all of the photos and they told the entire story of our wedding and events and THAT was our essay. We even put in hand made postcards from our fantasy trip and a pressed rose from the wedding (made out of paper). It was funny and whimsical (my husband is a wonderful cartoonist and he worked every night with me on this project of the heart).

I started journaling to myself about how excited I was when they called us to tell us we had been picked to win. I really believed we were going to win. Of course we hadn’t won at that point, but I was telling my mind a different story. What could it hurt to try that approach?

I can’t tell you how surprised and excited I was when it was announced via an Oprah show live that we were the winning couple of the Love Is In the Air wedding contest. We were married on a plane on our way to Barbados with 70 of our friends and family and it was even more magical than our fantastical entry. That happened in 1999. I am convinced of the Power of positive thinking and dreaming big, real BIG!! I let everyone know about The Secret and The Power. I’m a walking example of what can happen when you believe… that is just one example.